This page is partly about a single journey I took in Japan and partly about a great ticket that the national rail company in Japan sells in certain seasons that allows you to travel around Japan on the cheap. I'm writing these two things together because I used this ticket to travel all the way from Fukuoka to Sapporo and back, the longest single journey I have ever made by ground and certainly one I will never forget.

The ticket is known as the ju-hachi kippu, which literally means '18 (in this case referring to age) ticket'. I'm guessing the name comes from the fact that the ticket is really designed more for young people, although no restrictions exist on older people using the ticket. The idea behind the ticket is that you buy one ticket with five days of rail passes on it, which don't have to be used on consecutive days, and each day pass allows you to ride one day from midnight to midnight on any JR train. For those of you not familiar with the train system in Japan, there is basically one large national company (JR) which was only recently privatized, and then many different rail lines in the various cities that are run by smaller, private companies. JR is the one that offers this ticket, which works great no matter how far you want to travel because their rail lines extend all over the country, even within the major cities where they compete with the private lines. So say you want to travel from Osaka to Tokyo for as little money as possible. You go to your nearest JR station (and trust me, no matter where you live in Japan, there is always one close by), whip out about ¥12000 (about US$120, which gets you one ticket with 5 days on it), and they give you a little computer-printed ticket that you can present at any JR station to gain admittance to the platforms. As soon as you use the ticket on any day, they stamp one of your five slots on the card with the date and you merely present this at any other station you use that day, up until it expires at midnight. It is a wonderful little ticket, and by far the cheapest way to travel around Japan.

Despite its all-you-can-ride-in-a-day offer and excellent price that are available to all, the ju-hachi kippu has several drawbacks that deter all but young people from using the ticket anyway. First of all, the ticket is only sold and valid during certain seasons that typically coincide with student holidays. This keeps many adults with regular jobs and anybody else who can't travel during these certain seasons from taking advantage of this ticket. Another drawback to this ticket is that it only allows you to ride on the futsuu and kaisoku trains, the two slowest trains in the JR rail system that stop at more stations than the more expensive trains. There are thousands upon thousands of stops along the JR lines, most being only a few miles apart. So on the slower trains, one must wait for the train to stop at each small town station along the way from one city to another, as compared to the faster trains which skip most of the smaller stations. This can take an immense amount of time and extend a trip that would only take a few hours on the shinkansen (the famous "bullet train") into a full day affair. Also, in addition to the problem with time, the only seating in these trains usually consists of rather uncomfortable benches and occasionally padded seats that are almost always occupied when you get on the train unless you board at one of the first stops. This makes using this ticket very difficult for people in a hurry (there's quite a few of them in Japan) and just about anyone who minds being a bit uncomfortable for long periods of time (there's quite a few of them too in Japan). Another problem with using this ticket involves getting from one major city to the next in one piece. The various JR lines don't always go in the direction you want them to, at least not all the way there, so it is necessary on just about any trip longer than 50 miles or so to switch trains. This can be at times confusing, at times rushed, and at times just pure insanity. Before you depart for your destination some 300 miles away or so, you really have to get a JR jikokuhyou (schedule book), which lists times for every single rail line, train, and station in Japan, and figure out which trains to take and where to switch. The problem with this is that the book is only offered in Japanese, and even if you read quite a bit of Japanese and know the characters for every place you are going, it can still be very hard to understand. This is a serious drawback for many foreigners, especially if they have no Japanese experience at all.

Even with this last drawback, the ticket seems to be increasingly popular with foreigners in Japan. In fact, almost all foreigners I met in Japan had at least heard of the ticket, whereas many Japanese I talked to just stared at me blankly when I mentioned it. Most people who use the ticket are in fact Japanese, but they seem to be a very young, adventurous crowd and outside this specific group there are few Japanese who venture to use this ticket. The word is spreading about it, but there seem to be common misperceptions among the Japanese regarding who can actually use it and how hard it is to use. Many Japanese I talked to about the ticket, including my homestay sister, thought the ticket could only be purchased and used by students 18 years and younger, most probably due to the name of the ticket. Others figured using the slow trains just wouldn't get you anywhere without taking up your entire vacation period, not realizing that if you plan your trip right and use the kaisoku trains as much as possible, you can actually make pretty good time getting across Japan. Others had similar excuses, and it seemed to me that most Japanese didn't use the ticket either out of ignorance or laziness. Not that I feel this ticket is for everybody anyway. However, there are quite a few Japanese and foreigners alike out there who could save a lot of money and have a bit more fun getting across Japan if they looked into this ticket a bit more.

For me, after a few initial trips to places like Okinawa that required me to board a plane, the ju-hachi kippu became my only means of travel in Japan, with the exception of my hitchhiking experience on my second trip to Japan. My longest trip with this ticket was actually the first time I used it: a cross-country trek from Fukuoka to Sapporo and back, with a stopover in Tokyo along the way. I took the trip toward the end of March, which turned out to be an excellent time to visit the frosty city of Sapporo way up north in Hokkaidou. I was very fortunate to have my friend Aya-chan accompany me along the first leg of the trip to Tokyo, where she found us cheap accommodations at a friend's company housing. She also helped me use the JR schedule book, which I probably would have never figured out even with my growing knowledge of Japanese characters (the main problem with the characters is that even if you know a lot of characters used in everyday life, the names of cities and people often have rather strange characters in them and their pronunciation is not always self-evident, as most Japanese characters have more than one pronunciation, and names rarely follow any rules). So we hung out in Tokyo for a few days and covered as much of the city as we could in the limited amount of time we had, then I was off to Sapporo on my own. Traveling alone on the slow trains was actually a lot of fun. I struck up conversations with random people, many of them young Japanese using the same ticket as me, enjoyed the beautiful scenery and strange people that the Touhoku region had to offer, and listened to a small variety of almost incomprehensible Japanese dialects as I traveled through the different prefectures.

I arrived in Hakodate, a port at the southern tip of Hokkaido, after a long day of hard train benches and lousy station food. I was tired and smelly, not having showered since I left Tokyo, and worst of all I had a three hour wait until my next train, an all-nighter straight to Sapporo. I wandered around the city and was hoping to take the cable car to the top of the mountain behind the city to look out on supposedly the best night view in all of Japan. Unfortunately, the cable car had just closed for the evening and the mountain was definitely too high for me to climb. So I walked around the city to some of the surprisingly many tourist sites they had, most of them churches and museums built in the late 19th and early 20th centuries when Hokkaidou was first open to settlement. I stopped for a meal at a small joint near the station and then boarded my train for Sapporo. Fortunately, I had reserved a space in the sleeper car, which had three open compartments with hard floors and six futons per compartment for people to lay out on and sleep along the way.

The train arrived at 6 AM, and as I wasn't supposed to check in at the international center that had set up my homestay for the week until 10 AM, I threw my bag down on a bench and tried my best to sleep for a few hours. When the time came, I made my way over to the address on the fax I had been sent before I left, where my Sapporo homestay family (not to be confused with my real homestay family in Fukuoka) was waiting to take me home for the week. I spent my week exploring Sapporo and a few surrounding cities, as well as trying to plan my way home by JR. I soon discovered upon trying to make reservations for a night train into Tokyo, one of the quickest and best ways to get back, was completely full and I wouldn't be able to take the same route back. I went through the JR schedule book for hours trying to find an alternate route, but all of them required that I stay at least one night in a city along the way, which would cost me extra money and time. I finally just decided to check into plane tickets, but it was too much money to fly from Sapporo to Fukuoka. I then found out that the night train from Kyoto to Fukuoka, which I had originally planned to take anyway on the last leg of my return trip, still had a few seats left so I got one and then tried to find the cheapest way to get to Kyoto. It turned out after talking to a very nice young lady at the JAS office in Sapporo that they had a cheap flight from Akita, a small town in the Touhoku region, to Osaka, and it would allow me just enough time to get from Osaka to Kyoto in time for the train. However, if I was even a few minutes late getting there, I would have to stay the night in Kyoto, and I would also lose my seat on the night train and have to trek back by regular slow trains the next day.

To make a long story short, I arrived in Akita just an hour before my plane was scheduled to leave, took a 45-minute bus ride I hadn't planned on out to the airport, knocked several Japanese people over in a mad dash to my terminal, and then discovered that the flight had been delayed 15 minutes anyway. This was good because it meant I hadn't missed my plane, but it also meant I would be arriving in Osaka 15 minutes later than expected, and I was just praying I could still catch my train in Kyoto. I rushed out of the Osaka airport, hopped on the first bus to Kyoto, and got to the station just 5 minutes before the train arrived. It was very insane, but also the most exciting travel experience I've ever had and I pulled it off all by myself. I'm sure my mother would have been so proud!

I made it back to Fukuoka in one piece, and with two days left on my ticket and only one day left before the ticket expired, I took my homestay sister with me the very next day to Nagasaki. I must admit that all of this was very exhausting, and the slow trains are certainly not for the weak-hearted, but I enjoyed it enough to use the ticket for three more trips that summer. If you'd like to see pictures from any of these trips, or learn more about the crazy stuff I did on them, go back to the main page and click on the links there. I had a great time using the ju-hachi kippu and would definitely suggest it to anyone wanting to travel around Japan as cheap as possible and who also doesn't mind a little insanity and a very sore butt upon arrival to your final destination. In the end, it's definitely worth it!

While most of the pictures I took while using the ju-hachi kippu were of specific places and have accordingly been placed in the same directory with other pictures of those places, there are a few random pictures I took of the inside of the trains and of me goofing off during the more boring stretches of the trips. Just click on the link below to see them: